Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

+ Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

+ A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris.

+ Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language.

Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures was Chomsky's first published book, a short monograph that distilled the concepts presented in LSLT. It was published by a Dutch publishing house, Mouton. In 1956, Chomsky showed an editor at Mouton his lecture notes for MIT undergraduates and a revised version of these notes were published as Syntactic Structures in the first week of February, 1957. Favorable reviews from fellow American linguists, e.g., Robert Lees, made Syntactic Structures visible on the linguistic research landscape, and shortly thereafter the book created a revolution in the discipline.

Generative gramar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.